Music Tags

We are all familiar with MP3 and AAC music files, but did you know that these files contain additional information about the song, such as the name of the artist, the album, the song, etc?

This information is stored in so-called "MP3 Tags", which are also known as "id3 tags".

The "The Big Mean Folder Machine" supports music tags in these file formats:

  • mp3
  • m4p (Apple FairPlay encrypted music files from the iTunes music store)
  • m4b (bookmark-able mp4 for audio books)
  • m4a (AAC encoded files most often from CDs ripped in iTunes)

"The Big Mean Folder Machine" can extract the following information from these music files (if present):

  1. the song's title
  2. the name of the album
  3. the name of the artist
  4. the track number on the album
  5. the total number of tracks on the album
  6. the number of CDs in a set
  7. the number of the current CD in the set

You can use the information in these tags to specify the names of the folders within your folder hierarchy. The mechanism works by using a "pattern" supplied by you, which contains "placeholders" that will be replaced with the actual information from your music files.

Here is a complete list of all recognized placeholders:

<Song> The name of the song
<Artist> The artist's name
<Album> The name of the album
<NumTracks> The number of tracks on the album
<0NumTracks> The number of tracks on the album in double digits (e.g. 05, 20)
<TrackNum> The number of the track on the album
<0TrackNum> The number of the track on the album in double digits, (e.g. 01, 02, 03, .., 09, 10, 11, ..)
<CDNum> The number of the current CD in a set of CDs (such as audio books, compilations, etc.)
<0CDNum> The number of the current CD in a set of CDs in double digits (e.g. 01, 02, 03, .., 09, 10, 11, ..)
<NumCDs> The number of CDs in the current set of CDs
<0NumCDs> The number of CDs in the current set of CDs in double digits (e.g. 01, 02, 03, .., 09, 10, 11, ..)

Music files from reputable online source such as the iTunes Music Store, usually contain all of these "tags". This is not necessarily the case with files of unknown origin or that you "rip" yourself from music CDs. These files may well be missing some of the track information that "The Big Mean Folder Machine" requires or it may wrongly encode them.

When "The Big Mean Folder Machine" cannot find all the information that it requires to correctly replace all the placeholders in your pattern, it will place the file in the "others" folder.

Thus after processing, all files that are not compatible music files or which are missing tags that are required by the pattern that you have specificed, will end up in this "others" folder.